President Clinton added another G.O.P. proposal to his expanding list of veto targets: the House's rewrite of the federal Clean Water Act. The President claimed that the bill's looser environmental and antipollution standards would turn back years of progress and send water quality "straight down the drain." The measure's backers-it still must get past a skeptical Senate-said the President's veto threat revealed that he was a captive of "environmental extremists."

DIRTY-WATER STUDIES

Roiling the water debate, two environmental groups released studies indicating that 53 million people in the U.S. drink water that is contaminated by chemicals, pollutants...